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Friday, February 6, 2009

Four Quick Retail Packs of American Heritage

The main difference between Hobby and retail packs are that retail packs are at least a buck cheaper per pack, but the odds of pulling a chrome, relic, auto or patch are significantly harder. Chrome cards are 1:7 instead of 1:2 packs. Presidential Patch cards aren't that much harder at 1:44 instead of 1:36, but you know the vultures will have picked those out of retail before they even hit the shelves. There are a whole ton of odds for the relics and cuts and autos and such, just trust me that they are harder in retail. Still, they are about 33% cheaper for the same amount of cards, even if you will be getting mostly base cards. Here's four retail packs I picked up that turned out to be rather interesting. (* means I actually needed the card. wheee!)

Pack 1

55 Barbara Rose Johns*
66 Norman Rockwell
72 John C. Calhoun
101 The Landing at Plymouth Rock*
AC6 Jesse Ventura
70 Frederic Edwin Church
79 William Jennings Bryan
88 Tony Pastor

Not a heck of a lot I needed out of here. I did get a Celebrity card of Jesse the Body.

Pack 2

76 Robert Livingston
87 Joe Namath
94 J.P. Morgan*
100 Andrew Carnegie*

Uh oh...

I see blue...

Oh heck a redemption card...

A Certified American Celebrity...

Relic?!? They have redemption cards for Relics?!?

Jesse Ventura again! This goddamn better be a feather boa relic.

19 Amelia Earhart*
25 Winfield Scott*
36 Samuel Adams*

Ok, the irony of this pack? It was heavily searched. There are deep thumbnail grooves all over the Livingston card from where some assclown was feeling up the pack. I got a few cards I needed though. The redemption card kills me. It doesn't expire until 2012. I could be dead before I get my Jesse Ventura sportscoat swatch. I need a beer.

Pack 3

63 Frederic Remington*
74 Daniel Webster*
85 Buster Keaton*
104 The Constitution is ratified
AC9 Keith Olbermann
80 Henry Cabot Lodge*
90 Clara Bow*
57 Cesar Chavez*

This is one of the better packs I've gotten even though the Remington card is damaged. Lots of interesting characters in here. The Buster Keaton card will end up being one of my absolute favorites in the set, if not the favorite. "It Girl" Clara bow is pretty nifty too. There's also Daniel Webster of short story fame, union activist Chavez and right-wing bigot Henry Cabot Lodge. Then there's Keith. I know half of you out there like him and the other half despises him. You have to give him credit though, the man knows his baseball cards. He does not know, however, how to dress for a photo shoot to avoid looking like a dork on a trading card.

Pack 4

75 John Jay
83 George and Ira Gershwin*
78 Thurgood Marshall*
113 Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad*
132 John McCain SP*
23 George Marshall
12 William Clark
2 Herriet Beecher Stowe
David Wright Topps of the Class card. No, really.

Ok, here's a tip: do not buy any of these packs from the Target on the corner of Johnson Ferry and Upper Roswell in Marietta. Some fucktard completely ruined the John Jay card scrubbing the pack with his nail. It's so bad I'm just throwing the sucker away even though I need it. I went back and checked the Barbara Rose Johns card and there's a scrape on that one too. Pack searchers don't infuriate me like they do a lot of other bloggers out there, but they can at least learn how to do it without destroying the damn cards! A nifty card of Thurgood Marshall saves the pack for me. Here's some interesting lazyness from Topps though. Here's the John McCain SP I pulled:

And here's another SP card I have:

Oy. Well, the set is so good there had to be a little of the Topps lazyness popping up in there somewhere.

11 comments:

night owl said...

Pack-searching American Heritage?

Wow. Am I on the right planet?

Kevin said...

Awesome pull on the Jesse the Body relic. Do you think he was talking to pack searchers when he said:

"Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat."

Motherscratcher said...

I've never bought any of these packs before. Maybe I'll pick up a few on my daily (and ultimately unsuccessful) trip to target for 2009 cards.

Anonymous said...

I've bought a couple of packs and got that same Jesse Ventura redemption card.

MMayes said...

I can't imagine why they put that photo of John Calhoun on his '74 card. He looks like an escapee from some South Carolina offshore penal asylum.

My favorite Jesse Ventura line was after Gorilla Monsoon called some wrestler's nutshot a blow to the "lower abdomen":

"I think it was a little lower than that, Gorilla."

Jinxo56 said...

I work at Wal-Mart and we don't have the individual packs. We did get in some blaster boxes, but I bought them all. Employee discount is nice. I got a Franklin Pierce patch card and I also got the Jesse Ventura redemption card. I have already redeemed it and Topps claims I will have it by May 22.

Thomas said...

Two things -

1. Why do you refer to Lodge as "bigoted"?

2. There are two major packsearchers in Atlanta. One of them sells hotpacks on eBay, posts on the Blowoutcards.com boards (or at least used to), and tends to search the Northern and Northeastern Metro Atlanta area. He's too talented to scratch.

The other one hits mainly the I75 corridor where you were, and he's AWFUL. I'm going to show this post to my wife, and she's going to immediately remind me of 06 Bowman Chrome, where the guy - for some unknown reason - used three fingers to scratch all the way down the front of the Chrome packs. We never could figure out what the hell he was looking for like that. Suffice it to say that we got the auto out of that box, and the idiot missed a whole lot at that store. IIRC, it was on a hill, kind of hidden off the road in one of the shabbier Targets in Atlanta. Good times. We nicknamed him "Packscratcher".

dayf said...

Lodge was a forceful anti-immigrant legislator at the exact same time my grandfather and his family came to America from Italy. Apparently immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were not sufficiently equipped to "assimilate" into American society. My grandfather assimilated enough to own and operate hotels, nightclubs and restaurants in Atlantic City during the '30s and '40s, and started several businesses when he moved south in the '50s including a lawn mower manufacturing company that is still very successful today. But if Lodge had his way he would have stayed in Italy and I wouldn't exist. So yeah, fuck Henry Cabot Lodge :)

I've seen packscratcher's work before. I've just never come home with four packs wrecked by his idiocy. One day I shall hunt him down and viciously attack him with a nail clipper and emery board.

Thomas said...

I'd love to see him, the resealers (the guys who buy boxes and blasters, take out the good cards, reseal the packs/boxes/blasters and return them), the openers and the thieves all strung up. Whenever I see that someone has damaged the packs, or worse opened or resealed, I want to kick the garbage out of them, and so does my wife.

I hear you about Lodge, but those were different times. He was a nationalist, and while that can be bigoted, it kind of cheapens the word to refer to nationalism as bigotry.

Anonymous said...

A Cesar Chavez card? That's great!

That's almost a reason to buy baseball cards. Of course the counter to that is Henry Cabot Lodge and the like. Ughh!

Bay Rat North West said...

I been to FOUR Wal Marts in Fontana/Ontario area of LA. THREE Targets in same area, ONE K-Mart and THREE Targets and TWO wal Marts in Salt Lake since Friday. NONE have even put out or were willing to look in the back for 1009 products.
You guys SUCK!